


start small, grow tall

by weatheredlaw



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 11:31:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9233267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weatheredlaw/pseuds/weatheredlaw
Summary: It might take a hundred cups of tea, but Newt and Jacob are going to sort through this business of war, one day.





	

**Author's Note:**

> response to a headcanon by tumblr user teacup-occamy, who figures that newt and jacob talk about the war, and i liked that idea a whole awful lot.

Newt doesn’t often suffer the effects of rapidly changing time zones – his body is quite used to being on one half of the globe during the morning, and going to bed on the other side of the world. But he’s just come to New York from more than a month long stay _home_ – and there is nothing like home to create an episode of malcontent in his internal clock.

So he is awake. And he is hungry.

He is also surprised, in a way, to find Jacob sitting at the kitchen table of the Goldstein residence, nursing a glass of milk and flipping through an old newspaper. They exchange sympathetic grimaces.

“Can’t sleep?” Newt asks.

“Nah. You?”

Newt shakes his head. “Typically I don’t have trouble adjusting my clock, but I went home. Not a mistake,” he adds. “I’m very glad I did.”

“Well, we’re glad you could make it back.”

“As am I.” Newt taps the tea kettle with his wand. “Would you like a cup?”

“Please.” Jacob watches the scene as he often watches magic occur these days – a mixed expression of longing and awe, but always oddly pleased to be able to see it. Newt joins him at the table. “Tina’s real glad you’re back.”

Newt feels his neck grow hot, and thinks about the woman in the bed he just left, and how exquisitely happy he has been to see her. “I hope to stay a bit longer, but my brother may need me.”

“Right, right.” Jacob sniffs. “I keep forgetting you guys are fighting a war of your own.”

“And so soon after the last,” Newt murmurs, shaking his head. “But. It can’t be helped.”

“Your Ministry doing much?”

“Not really. So long as we still have Fawley, we still have very little support.” Newt sighs, sending freshly brewed tea into the proper cups and bringing them to the table.

“Do you…” Jacob takes his, adding sugar and a spot of his milk before saying quietly, “Well. Never mind.”

“You’re welcome to ask whatever you’d like,” Newt says.

“I just…you told me once that you…were in the war. It’s hard to remember, sometimes.” He taps his temple. “Still fuzzy, on some things. But you mentioned… _dragons._ ”

“Yes.”

“Do you think about it?”

Newt nods. “I think about the war every day.”

“Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

“Is that what keeps you awake?” Newt asks, taking a sip of his tea. Jacob nods. “I have a few charms for dreamless sleep, but I don’t recommend them long term.”

“It’s not about that. It’s not about anything, I guess. I just…thought I might be done with it now, you know?”

“I do.”

“Guess you never really are.”

Newt looks at the table, reaching out to scratch at the wood with a nail. “My brother was quite involved, in a different way than I. Conflict kept churning up dragon reservations, and they worried about secrecy and such, so they sent me in. Theseus had a battalion, there on the front lines. They would go in, do their job, and vanish. But sometimes they…sometimes it lasted a while, he said. Doesn’t matter if you bring magic to war with you, a gun is still a gun, he said.”

“He remembers, too, then.”

Newt nods. “They call my brother a war hero, because he saved so many lives, you know. Gained a bit of a reputation.”

“Bet he hates it.”

“ _Loathes_ it,” Newt says. “With every fiber of his being.”

“Yeah.” Jacob leans back in his chair. “I went with a buddy of mine. Hank. We grew up together, he lived with his mom up the street. Went to the same school and everything. Got shipped over at the same time, went everywhere together.” Newt watches, and doesn’t have to be like Queenie to know how the story ends. “Our trench flooded one night, it all got soggy in there. Real muddy. He took a bullet to the leg, got a nasty infection. It was just…it was such a lousy way to go. He was cryin’ for his mom, wasted away like that. Lots of guys did. Made you feel guilty after a while, like you’d found some way to get out of dying, you know? Guys kept looking at _me_ , wondering how I was still kickin’.”

“I’m very sorry Jacob.”

“That happen to you? You lose anyone?”

Newt nods. “A few people I knew in school. I didn’t have many friends, though. I went into the war alone. I lost a dragon. It was very messy. She took a long while to go, but that was my fault. I thought…I really thought I was clever enough to keep her alive. It turned out she was just dying, and I could have stopped it sooner.” He spreads his hand flat on the table. “I know it’s not the same—”

Jacob shakes his head. “If it keeps you up, then it matters.” He looks at Newt. “Does it?”

“Yes. Often.”

“I’m surprised a war could kill a dragon.”

Newt laughs, but it’s a bitter sound, one Jacob seems to understand. “You know war, my friend. It’s a beast of its own.”

“Yeah.” Jacob sighs, taking a sip of his tea. “It really is.”

 

* * *

 

It becomes a routine of theirs – rising in the night together, swapping a story here and there over tea. Sometimes they sit in silence after a particular moment. Sometimes they laugh, poking fun at commanders in was they’d never have done in front of a superior officer.

Sometimes it’s hard to get the words out.

“I can still taste the mud, you know?” Jacob pushes his tea away. “It was in everything.”

“Your mouth and your hair,” Newt mutters. “Clothes and shoes.”

“Yeah. _Yeah._ You had it, too.”

“Every day.”

“Good grief.” Jacob shakes his head.

“I thought I was _becoming_ mud,” Newt says.

“I drank it. I swear, you couldn’t open your mouth to eat something and not get a fistful of mud.”

“When it rains, do you ever—”

“Yes,” Jacob says, voice a little hoarse. “Every time. You?”

“Every time.”

 

* * *

 

There eventually come nights where they do not meet at all. Newt doesn’t know if it’s working, if talking it out is finally making a difference, or he’s just gotten used to the time change, and Jacob’s finally found a bit of peace –

But it’s comforting all the same.

Still, in the night, he sometimes wakes to the sound of the Ironbelly taking a round of gunfire to the chest, plummeting to the ground and sending a tidal wave of mud over Newt and his men. He hears her dying screeches as he tried to fix her, wiping mud and blood from his face, nursing a wound in his side.

He goes to the kitchen on those nights. Sometimes Jacob is there, sometimes he isn’t. Every time, Newt is awake til sunrise.

But it gets better, he supposes. As all things eventually do. Tina beckons him back to bed, and Newt goes, relishing in her embrace and her voice, the first thing in ages to drown out the memory.

That, and tea, he thinks. Tea with someone who understands, finally. Someone who can say, _yes, me too._

Because that’s important, he realizes. So important, to have your pain oddly validated. And he will take it where he can get it, will take it here before anywhere else because Jacob is a good man, who doesn’t deserve to have lost his best friend, and come home alone.

He is a good man who deserves the family he’s found. And Newt’s only too happy to be part of it.


End file.
